The rapid growth in Internet usage has given users access to a wide range of sources for text, audio, video, and multimedia content provided in many different formats. At the same time, the costs of producing content have plummeted, allowing end-users to produce and distribute a substantial amount of media content. As a result, websites that offer free content-hosting services, such as YouTube and MySpace, have become popular both with amateur content providers and with an ever-growing audience.
The exponential growth in the use of content-sharing websites and networks has made it increasingly difficult to monitor user activity. The distribution of copyrighted and otherwise protected content has become a common problem for such websites, as users mix protected content in with the user-generated content intended to be distributed on such websites. Similarly, many such websites and networks prohibit the distribution of pornographic, explicit, or inflammatory content. In fact, the operators of content-sharing sites and networks may face lawsuits from copyright holders and complaints from offended users if protected and/or prohibited content is not identified and removed. Nonetheless, policing the distribution of such files can be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Given the exponential growth in the amount of user-uploaded content available on such content-sharing sites, traditional approaches to applying audio/video content detection techniques are no longer effective. Implementation of process-intensive approaches that require in-depth analysis of the content and/or transmission of massive amounts of signature data would result in system configurations that are economically unviable due to cost and complexity.